> [Namecheap] has an outdated, 2000s-era UI, but to me, that's a positive sign.
I wish more websites had outdated, 2000s-era UI.
"Trendy" and "modern" are not synonymous with "good". "Outdated" is not synonymous with "bad". Change for the sake of change is not good. Following trends just means you don't know how to think for yourself.
I'm sure Cloudflare provides a great service, but putting both DNS services and domain registration under one umbrella feels like too large a single point of failure to me. Switching registrars is super annoying (I'm so glad I didn't trust Google Domains long-term for anything important)
I've been using Gandi for the last decade but I'm looking at rolling over to porkbun. I was initially attracted to them being in a privacy-friendly country as well as competitively priced and included free email accounts that suited my limited needs. They got bought out a few years back and things have been badly degrading in terms of offerings vs price. They're now completely ditching any free email later this year and the renewals have skyrocketed in price. They've also started sending off awful and obvious customer retention emails about how much they value me as a customer (despite, you know, showing nothing but contempt for my wallet).
I switched to Gandi over a decade ago because they were in a non-US jurisdiction, had proper 2FA and reasonable policies. The recent buyout is why I started moving over to Porkbun (I also have a Cloudflare account, but don't want to host my DNS with them).
Same here - I just moved my project domains from Gandi to NearlyFreeSpeech after a decade or so. All of the reasons I chose Gandi originally have disappeared and they keep raising prices while cutting features. Sad times, I really liked them.
Well said, I've also been using Gandi for quite some time now. I recently moved a .com domain over to Cloudflare. However, I'm still using them for some ccTLDs that Cloudflare doesn't yet support.
Is it because they don't capture enough volume on registrations alone? I wonder what makes them usually trend to mediocre (at best) to awful (at worst, unfortunately often)
It is amazing, for the base concept of the Internet being a decentralized network to survive outages, how much centralization has occurred. I use a separate registrar (porkbun in my case), with that thought in mind.
Thats the main reason I don't register through CloudFlare too. I've heard lots of comments like the parent "its good enough". But I don't want to centralize my domain and my CDN. A little separation is nice. So I register elsewhere and use CloudFlare proxies.
CloudFlare still feels "too good to be true" to me. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. They offer way too much for free. I'm taking advantage of the free tier CDN for now, since it is overly generous. But I keep thinking one day they are going to pull the rug out from under us (like we've seen with so many tech companies before) and a lot of devs will feel trapped with CloudFlare. So that is why I mostly keep my domain registrations away from them. The savings are honestly minimal in my experience for registrations.
It's like having a prenup. If they sour the relationship and I want a divorce, it's easy to just point my domains elsewhere and move on quickly and effortlessly.
In the early days of DigitalOcean we pushed people to iwantmyname for no other reason than the platform was super easy to use, no pushing additional services, and Timo the founder is a really stand up guy. I still think Timo is a super awesome dude but the platform has stagnated a bit. I really like what namecheap is doing and also that Ted is active here on HN news. I've had multiple issues (my fault) and one email to Ted and they've been fixed. If it's support you're after, I for sure think iwantmyname and namecheap are the two top registrars.
I like Cloudflare well enough, but prefer not to be forced to use its DNS (even though I do use it), so am very happy with Porkbun post-Google-Domains.
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I wish more websites had outdated, 2000s-era UI.
"Trendy" and "modern" are not synonymous with "good". "Outdated" is not synonymous with "bad". Change for the sake of change is not good. Following trends just means you don't know how to think for yourself.
I've found switching registrars to be pretty easy. I've done it several times with production domains.
How is switching registrars annoying?
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Nevertheless, i love that Porkbun is local.
Is it because they don't capture enough volume on registrations alone? I wonder what makes them usually trend to mediocre (at best) to awful (at worst, unfortunately often)
CloudFlare still feels "too good to be true" to me. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. They offer way too much for free. I'm taking advantage of the free tier CDN for now, since it is overly generous. But I keep thinking one day they are going to pull the rug out from under us (like we've seen with so many tech companies before) and a lot of devs will feel trapped with CloudFlare. So that is why I mostly keep my domain registrations away from them. The savings are honestly minimal in my experience for registrations.
It's like having a prenup. If they sour the relationship and I want a divorce, it's easy to just point my domains elsewhere and move on quickly and effortlessly.